Clinton: We'll put coal miners out of business
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have dug herself a deep hole across Kentucky and Appalachia tonight, even though she may not have intended to do so - and she may have won votes in other states.
On CNN, she said: "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."
That was just a part of her expansive comments about how she did not want to leave miners and others in coal country behind during a power generation shift to cleaner sources of energy, and that she has plans to boost devastated coal-community economies.
Still, the words that will end up in campaign ads will be the truncated version that appears to attack jobs.
It had the ring of what then Sen. Barack Obama once said, which has never been forgotten in states like Kentucky: "So if somebody wants to build a coal power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Some have argued those comments were taken out of context. Still, President Obama has carried out an aggressive climate change agenda, which is a threat to coal. We will see whether Sec. Clinton clarifies or adds anything to these CNN comments in the days ahead.
The fact is, coal in Kentucky is on a steep decline for a variety of reasons, including a dramatic decrease in the cost of natural gas. But President Obama has made tackling climate change a reputational issue. Ms. Clinton and her competition in the Democratic primaries have said they plan to continue a clean energy shift, while Republicans are either denying mainstream climate change science or saying there is little the US can do.
Reporter James Bruggers writes this Watchdog Earth blog item. Reach him at (502) 582-4645 or at jbruggers@courier-journal.com.
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